By Hy Bender, Featuring in-depth interviews with Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman and is one of those creators-- like Dave Sim of *Cerebus*
fame, who with apparent effortlessness can bring comic writing to entirely new
levels. The difference between the pair
is that where Dave Sim has spent his career chronicling every single thought of
the characters in his *Cerebus* universe, Neil Gaiman has been remarkably
prolific across several fields of writing. Gaiman has penned novels,
screenplays, and recently even moved into translation with
Hy Bender's *The Sandman Companion* is a book that takes that ambition and wrings it, squeezing every last ounce of data to be admired from the 76-issue, ten-year run of *Sandman*, Gaiman's twisting work about nothing more than concepts who walk and talk.
The characters in the *Sandman*universe are brilliant creations, as likely to be walking embodiments of symbols as they are to be ordinary people. Central to the series are the eternal beings known as the Endless. The members of the Endless are are, for those of you who are as recent to discover Gaiman's work as I: the Hamlet-like, ennui-ridden Dream; the childlike Delirium, who once upon a time was known as Delight but now wanders the dimensions unable to hold a cogent thought; the grotesque, sadistic, and lonely Despair; the impossibly beautiful Desire; and a large and lovable Viking-like Destruction. Gaiman presents these characters as flesh and blood, but we learn that they only exist because the people in the world recognize these concepts as having power.
In the *Companion*, Bender sits down over five days with Neil Gaiman and discusses *Sandman* in such detail that it amazes me that the author (usually the last person to remember his work all that well) cam keep up. They proceed from story arc to story arc, conveniently labeling the arcs according to their titles as released in trade paperback form.
Gaiman tells us how *Sandman* got started-- oddly, as a monthly title meant to prove Gaiman's abilities in order for DC to release the prestige-format book *Black Orchid*. "After you… have reached some prominence, we'll release *Black Orchid," Gaiman says Vertigo Editor Karen Berger told him. As it happened, *Sandman* became the play itself.
The choice to focus on Endless immortal characters was not Gaiman's first. He wanted to do a series about the Phantom Stranger, but someone else was doing that. Same thing with the Spectre and the Demon. But what he didn’t want to was write a monthly title about costumed heroes. Finally Gaiman hit on an idea-- revamp an obscure 70's character, the dream-protecting superhero Sandman, and put him in a strip that would feature an endless line of equally obscure DC characters. Cain and Abel, who despite their cameo appearances in everything from Dante's *Inferno* to countless Biblical epics, were most recently hosts of a horror anthology for DC, would play a part, as would the other horror hosts DC had used. And it would be weird: Gaiman was convinced that even had he wanted to he probably couldn't do a regular hero story, with monthly cliffhangers. But if DC would allow him the freedom, he figured he could tell really odd stories for a good long time.
The series began with a justification for itself: Gaiman had to explain to the readers of DC continuity why it was they'd never heard of this "Sandman." Thus in issue 1, Sandman escapes from a 72-year imprisonment at the hands of an Aleister Crowley-like magician. He wanders the globe, alerting the other immortal concepts to the return of the godlike Dream, and even "goes walkies" with his sister Death, re-acquainting himself with her as she cheerfully guides mortals from one life to the next. And already, with that first arc, we see that this is not a normal comic: Gaiman tells us how he tied in the Sandman's imprisonment with a famous case of "sleeping sickness" that mysteriously swept through in 1916. The magician in turn is patterned after the satanic mage in the book *The Devil Rides Out*, while his incantation is a deliberate echo of a famous poem.
But Gaiman tells us he was still struggling, and editor Karen Berger reveals why it was that he was able to keep the series going as he discovered a strange new voice: he already had pacing and a respect for the familiar way stories were told. "Neil created the trappings of the superhero comic, in terms of structure, the uses of conflict, and pacing-- albeit with cooler clothes and arguably cooler concepts. So he got existing comics readers into a territory they were familiar with, but which was in key ways a very different territory; and then he slowly moved them further and further out to the range of the unfamiliar." Thus Sandman and his family were our heroes, but his choice of subject matter allowed him to riff on myth, pop culture, even metaphysics.
By the end of the series, *Sandman* was so complex it was almost impossible to describe, and yet any given issue was still easy to read, because of the clarity of each little story. I love the moment in *Brief Lives,* which turns the series towards its end, when we pause for a moment to learn the story of the little chocolate people one of the characters idly eats while he talks. The little chocolate men and women dance and make love before dying, and it's such a delightfully perverse and whimsical moment that it made me utterly fall in love with *Sandman*. *The Sandman Companion* is a careful walk through one of the top five (at least) comics series.
The nature of comics, *Companion* writer Bender says, is that unlike pother media, your whole brain is being used as you read. The left hemisphere decodes the written words, while the right hemisphere gives life to the pictures observed in the panels. A comic like *Sandman*requires no less effort to read than any comic with balloons and captions. The difference is that the effort will be so much more worthwhile.